MONTREAL—A star candidate for the federalist Liberal party in Quebec claimed to have voted to separate from Canada in the 1995 referendum, according to a senior
Parti Québécois
member.

Dr. Gaétan Barrette, the former head of the province’s federation of medical specialists, boasted in an interview televised Friday night that PQ leader Pauline Marois tried to convince him to run for her sovereigntist party in the run-up to the last election campaign in 2012.

Asked about the overture that was ultimately rejected (Barrette ran as a candidate for the
Coalition Avenir Québec
but was defeated), outgoing PQ minister Bernard Drainville told reporters Saturday that Barrette had been shopping himself around to all parties ahead of the last election.

Before any offer was made, Drainville said he wanted to test Barrette’s sovereigntist leanings.

Barrette later tweeted that he told the PQ it was his family who voted for independence, not him.

The 1995 referendum was the second attempt by a Parti Québécois government to make Quebec an independent nation. The first was in 1980. The federalist “No” side won the 1995 vote by the thinnest of margins.

In this election, Barrette has been rolled out as one of the Quebec Liberal party’s health experts by leader Philippe Couillard, who is himself a neurosurgeon. Couillard is an unabashed federalist and has repeatedly attacked Marois’s party in the opening days of the campaign for seeking a majority government in order to hold a third referendum.

“It would be interesting to ask Mr. Couillard if there are sovereigntists in his party,” Drainville remarked Saturday.

Couillard, who was campaigning in the towns of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu and Drummondville, did not immediately respond to the revelations about Barrette.

The leader of the Coalition Avenir Québec, which had 18 seats in the legislature when the election was called, said on Saturday that he would vote against independence in any possible third referendum.
François Legault
, a former PQ minister, was dogged in the 2012 campaign by an ambiguous position that he was neither a sovereigntist nor federalist.

Correction- March 10. 2014:
This article was edited from a previous version that mistakenly said the first Quebec referendum was held in 1989.

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